Content providers distribute content, services, and other information to a user's premises via an information distribution network using various protocols. Users at the premises are increasingly demanding a greater variety of content, services, and other information at a faster response time. This has led to a growing collection of management schemes and protocols used throughout a distribution network. The content to be delivered may be encrypted depending upon the content and/or service. In addition, users may want to receive content in different formats depending on the device being used for accessing received content. Users may also want to access the same content at different times on different devices. For example, users may access content for use on a portable device during a particular time period and access the same content via a second device such as a stationary device during a second time period. This may occur, for example, when a user starts to watch a video on a mobile device and returns home to finish watching the remaining video content on a home television.
Thus, to support different devices, content may be converted into different formats so that users may access and utilize the content on different media devices. Storing multiple formats of the same content for delivery to users utilizing different devices requires large amounts of storage, provides increased operational cost for preprocessing of the content into different formats, and may not provide content for new device formats which may be introduced into the market. Thus, there is an ever present need for efficient solutions for providing content to numerous different devices without storing the sane content in numerous different formats.